Hainbach is a youtuber and experimental musician that creates music and videos about experimental sound equipment and music. Hainbach has garnered much popularity throughout the last few years, for his interesting deep dives on obscure gear and how he uses it to create experimental music. In his channel he goes through painstaking detail on how he writes, records, practises, and performs experimental sound. His fondness for tape and analog equipment has greatly inspired the Sound Libraries I will be curating in the next unit. In particular the second Sound Library “Lost in Fog” which is a lofi Sound Library taking insperation from early 1990s-2000s horror games such as Resident Evil and Silent Hill. Much of Hainbachs music is lofi, with him primarlly usnig tape as his recording preference. He uses a mixture of tape machines, such as Reel to Reel, cassette, and microcassette. Hainbachs use of granular synthesis was also a massive insperation, he made a app called Fluss which is a granular synthesis app that can be used on a desktop and a phone or tablet. The app is very simple but affective, since it can be used on a phone it makes creating experimental music very easy to do when away from equipment or a desktop.
I used the app to create an entire composition for an upcoming ep of mine, the piece titled “vhs” was made entierly by chopping up samples in Fluss. The Fluss app inspired me to explore granular synthesis on the Sound Libraries, as granular synthesis is very customisable and creates very interesing textures and sounds. Granular synthesis is when a sound is broken down into grains, you can adjust the grains on how you want it to sound, and the position of the soundfile were you want the grains to appear. Grains act as mini samples, that can be spread around the audio file, making a chopped up glitchy sound. Granular synthesis can be used in many ways, for example. I created a demo using the ableton granulator 2 plug in, I decided to use a Hainbach sample of him playing a piano that had been recorded onto tape which he had uploaded for people to use. I set myself the challange to compose a demo piece only using this one sound, and the sound had to be processed through the granulator. This was inspired by Hainbachs video “Composing With A Minimal Setup”. Here is a link to the demo I created
I only ended up using four tracks, which is good reference for the future as I could do this on a 4 track when it comes to recording the tracks for the Sound Libraries. Each track is running through a very small reverb to give some space to the sounds, apart from the second layer which has the reverb 100% in the mix to create a pad to create a spacey dreamlike tone. I found that using the same sounds just in various pitches created a really nice texture to the piece, the sound varied from each other with only slight variations such as pitch. It showed me how versitile granular synthesis is.
I used SketchCassette2, a plugin by abberent dsp, on the master track. SketchCassette2 is a plugin that emulates different types of cassettes. I used the preset entitled “Hi, How Are You” which is named and replicated of the sound of musician Daniel Jonhston, a muscian known for his lofi cassette tape recordings. I played with the ‘dropouts’ section, to make the music dropout less often but to give it a choppy lofi sound that you would get from a heavily worn out cassette tape. This was also inspired by Hainbachs heavy use of tape. The reason this was all done digitally in contrast to using physical equipment was to test the waters of what I could do without wasting a tape which can get pretty expensive if being repurchased constantly. I thought that this demo turned out really nicley. The main goal was to emulate the sound of a save room in a resident evil or silent hill game, or to capture the moment early on in either games when you are wondering around, not knowing what horrifying things are about to take place. For the recording of the Sound Libraries, I will try an analog version of this set up.
Bibliography
Youtube (2017) Composing With A Minimal Setup | OP1, FX Deformer, Piano, Dictaphone, Timeline. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKZi1V2WXR8&t=202s (Accessed 30th November)